Face recognition software is a mixed bag. For some people, knowing that someone can snap a photo of your face with their smartphone and be linked to all of your personal information, including your social security number, is a bit worrisome. However, when put into the right hands, facial recognition software can do some pretty amazing things.

University of Washington researchers are using face recognition software to bring a series of photos to life in what they call a “photobio.” If you’re like me, your hard drive is full of thousands of photos that just sit there. A family vacation can fill your camera’s SD card up in just a few hours. You come home, dump them on your hard drive, and then continue to take more and more photos that rarely leave the folder on your computer in which they’re tucked away.

If you want to actually put your photos to use, you could just upload them to Facebook where they’ll, again, just sit. Or, you could make them into a photobio. Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman, a post-doctoral student at the University of Washington, helped create a program that will pinpoint a person’s face throughout hundreds or thousands of photos and then creates a digital timeline of them. The idea was to make a “this is your life” type of movie, and Kemelmacher-Shlizerman’s technology has been used in Google’s Picasa for about a year now under the moniker of Face Movie.

The software starts with photos that are tagged with the same person. Then, it creates a timeline based on placement and facial similarities. The software basically puts the photos in order from birth to age 20, as shown in the example video below. The subject’s face remains fixed in each photo, which makes the transitions much smoother than the normal one-photo-a-day time-lapse videos. Don’t get us wrong, these are interesting, but they also produce a rather jarring effect for the person watching the video as the photos change from one to the next.

The technology uses cross-dissolve to create the illusion that the photos are basically melding into each other. Picasa users can basically play their Face Movie almost immediately after clicking the Face Movie button. It’s really a simple process.

Kemelmacher-Shlizerman and her team’s research will be published in a paper at SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques), a conference in Vancouver, Canada, next week.

To get an idea of how Face Movie works in Picasa, check out the video below.

If you’re interested in the technical aspects of the photobio project, check out the video below.